Wait

It's summertime in Montana, and because we ranch, because animals and plants and the weather are on their own time, I sit around and wait a lot. There's a book in front of me, on the dining room table, and I would have read to the end of the chapter, but something makes me lay it down, open, in favor of writing. I'm not really sure how much time I have; all I know is once ten o'clock comes, I'll be walking across the creek and into the stack yard--the place where we wrap the bales of hay in air-tight plastic and lay them down in long rows, like blown up tobacco rolls in bright white.

There's a boy out there I'm not so sure about. His hands--what I've seen of them--soft around a can of Coors Banquet, the tips of his fingers plush, prints pushing into the skin of my knuckles when he reaches across me--make me a little uncomfortable. I work longer hours, use those appendages more, and yet the softness of him is the same as mine. Why am I soft? But he makes my brother happy, and that makes me happy--my brother needs friends, and I need the reassurance that he has them. 

More waiting; I watch them walk down the path to the gate after lunchtime, sunlight on their necks, making my brother's tan skin shine. I watch his friend run, lumbering a little across the dusty yard. The cat swings her head around and peers at me with something akin to confusion, but that's not it--she's a little deaf, a lot blind, or vice versa, maybe--she's lost in thought. The kind of thought anyone can have when all of their vital senses are dulled, the kind of lethargy that comes from being far underwater or in a small, locked room. 

Two hours before I go to work, at the restaurant on the west side of town. 

More waiting.

I should shower, probably. Wait until the cold water runs hot. Step out, wait until the air dries my hair. Find the clothes I need, wait until I have to leave.

Light spills through the window onto the table, and I let my head fall forward onto my forearms, cheek cooled by the plastic table cover.

Or maybe, today, someone can wait for me.